This episode looks at US perceptions of Mexico through map making during the US / Mexico War, in which a private publisher sold maps that were reissued annually to reflect ongoing progress in the campaign. Intended for a general, popular audience, these maps served as propaganda in aid of the conflict, but historians and military analysts alike have ignored them until recently—even though they may well have influenced the positioning of the border at the war’s end.

Guest Chloe Ireton looks at the intriguing history of maps as propaganda and the role of two publishing houses—J. Disturnell and Ensigns & Thayer—not only in rewriting the history of the Mexican-American war, but in influencing the outcome of the war even as it was still ongoing.

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NOT EVEN PAST is a website produced by the faculty and students of the History Department at The University of Texas at Austin to make our research available to the public. We provide short, accessible articles, podcasts, book discussons & more on topics that span the globe and reach deep back into history.

By Ted Banks (This article is reposted from Fourth Part of the World.) The Progressive-Era white press and their audience had a fascination with Indians judging from the amount of ink that was devoted to musings on their place and progress in society. One component of that fascination, indeed one that was the basis for […]

By Jesse Ritner If you open a textbook on geology and flip through to the chapter on geological time it will tell you we are currently living in the epoch of the Holocene. The Holocene started approximately 10,000 years before present with the end of the last ice age. However, research by a diverse array […]

By Edward Shore (This is the first of two articles on a post-custodial digital archiving project being carried out by a group of researchers and archivists from UT Austin’s LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections together with their colleagues in the Ribeira Valley in Brazil.) The author dedicates this essay to anti-dam activists on […]

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The University of Texas at Austin is a free-speech campus. Opinions expressed by guests on 15 Minute History do not reflect the official position of the University, the College of Liberal Arts, or any of its constituent departments or organizations.